The digital African Studies General Collections have been developed and managed to support the past, ongoing and future needs of University of Florida's Center for African Studies, one of the most active and well regarded such centers in North America and the only United States Department of Education Title VI Center for African Studies in the southeastern U.S.

The African Studies Collection, from which this digital collection is drawn, is recognized as a unique resource within the University of Florida's George A. Smathers libraries, ranking among the best such collections in the U.S. Its holdings include disciplinary topics from the natural sciences and applied fields such as agriculture and public health, to the social sciences, humanities, and professions. Reflecting the great breadth and depth of these academic and professional programs, the African Studies Collection facilitates interdisciplinary and applied approaches to the study of the continent, its flora and fauna, peoples and cultures, natural resources and wildlife for which UF's African Studies programs are best known. Please view a brief overview presentation of the collection and the Sobek software to get a better idea of how to use these materials.

Notable print holdings (from which many of the digital collections derive) include the George Fortune collection of Southern Bantu linguistics (especially Shona), the Donald Abraham collection of Lusophone culture and history (concentrating on Angola and Mozambique), Gwendolen M. Carter’s materials relating to the South African liberation struggle, and Martin Rikli’s photographic albums of Ethiopia during the Italian invasion and occupation of 1935-1936. Finding aids for these and related manuscript collections, most of which are yet to be digitized, are available online. Among our newest manuscripts available with selected digitized images are the Records of the East African Professional Hunters Association (EAPHA) and the Ian Parker Collection relating to East African wildlife conservation (from which are digitized over 3,000 elephant biological data sheet records along with several reports on the international ivory trade and related conservation materials).

For maps of Africa, see also the African Map Collection which offers maps dating from the 16th
through the 21st centuries, including examples of work from the most important cartographers and representing some of the most
important maps from the Age of Exploration to the present day.

SubCollections

The J. M. Derscheid collection of materials on Rwanda and Burundi includes approximately 2,500 items with illustrations and maps, with materials on Ruanda-Urundi, with some documents on Kivu and Oriental provinces, and Belgian Congo.
There is an online guide to the collection, prepared from a photocopied typescript provided by René Lemarchand. The materials are chiefly administrative reports of District Commissioners and Governors (e.g. Bourgeois, R. 1934. "Notes sur l’Administration des indigenes du Territoire de Shangugu (Ruanda)" Typescript. 83 pages) and include oral histories, genealogies of clan chiefs from ca. 1859-1940, censuses, correspondence and reports by missionaries. The collection is from a set of microfilm reels of the original materials. The collection materials are in French, German (and possibly Flemish).Jean Marie Derscheid

Professor George Fortune was born on July 31, 1915 in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia). After receiving a Ph.D. in Bantu Languages from the University of Cape Town in 1950, Fortune was appointed lecturer within that Department. In 1962, he became the first chair of the Department of African Languages at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now the Department of African Languages and Literatures at the University of Zimbabwe), a position which he retained until 1980. He currently lives in Wales. Professor Fortune has conducted extensive research and written widely on Central and Southern African languages for over fifty years. His writings concerning the Shona language were crucial to the development of a standard Shona orthography, and texts such as Elements of Shona are regarded as canonical. Fortune also played a key role in establishing African linguistics as a field of study at African universities. Later in his career, Professor Fortune became very much invGeorge Fortune Collection

The Onitsha Market Literature digital collection includes pamphlets that were written, published, and sold by and to many Igbo people newly literate in English. The use of letter presses and type sold secondhand by missions and government offices allows the tracking of their use through forensic clues in the type itself (sometimes mixed on a single page).Onitsha Market Literature

The Wildlife Conservation aggregation brings together collection materials relating to African wildlife conservation. Currently only the Bob Campbell Papers are included, but other current SASC manuscript collections that may be included here are: Graham and Brian Child, the records of the East African Professional Hunters Association,
Larry D. Harris Papers, and the papers of Ian S. C. Parker. Wildlife Conservation